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One of the most dramatic sights in Alaska
is watching house-sized chunks of ice sheave off their parent glacier to splash
mightily into the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean’s Glacier
Bay.

It was 6 a.m. when our ship, the M/S Ryndam, entered Alaska’s Glacier Bay. We
cruised among small chunks of ice then stopped about 10 a.m., 400-to-500 yards
from the face of the Margerie Glacier. The ship then moved a short distance
about an hour later so we could see the nearby John Hopkins Glacier. U.S. Park
Rangers were aboard to provide narrative. The cold water was thickly dotted by
tiny icebergs that reminded me of a humongous milkshake. The steep-sloped
mountains on either side of the bay were covered with snow and ice.

I had my usual breakfast delivered by room service. It
consisted of bacon, two scrambled eggs, two pieces of whole wheat bread toast,
a wedge of hash browns, slice of orange, small glass of tomato juice, Diet Coke
and a glass of ice water. I had also ordered a small bagel with cream cheese
and a pastry for a mid-morning snack later. While I worked on my travelogue
notes, Betty went upstairs to the Lido Restaurant buffet to enjoy her usual
light breakfast, which this time consisted of coffee, fruit and a raisin bun.

We were told that Glacier Bay
was impenetrable to ships 200 years ago because it was blocked by a giant wall
of ice. Since then, ice in the bay has gradually receded to uncover a new
waterway that is 65 miles long, containing many fiords and inlets. At some
times, visiting boats have sightings of seals, whales, porpoises, mountain
goats, bears, eagles and a variety of birds which live in the bay.

Betty spotted two bears on a distant shore. One brown bear
(maybe a grizzly) cavorted off the beach and into a thicket of shrubs as she
watched through binoculars. The PA announced another bear on my side of the
boat (the starboard), but I never could spot it. Even with my 7x35 binoculars,
the shoreline images a half-mile away were quite small.

I sat by a big picture window on the pool deck and watched
the glacier for calving activity through my binoculars. The face of the glacier
was an imposing sight, with centuries-old ice perhaps 80 feet tall and taking
on a light blue tinge from the reflected sunlight and its compression by the
massive weight of ice. Every now and then a large section of ice would shear
off the face and make a big splash as it hit the water. It was a real treat to
see firsthand such a magnificent sight in nature that has become commonplace on
television and in the movies.

A ship’s brochure told how Glacier Bay
was discovered in 1879 by naturalist-adventurer John Muir. As a young Boy Scout
in the 1950s, I had camped in beautiful woods near San Francisco that had been named in his
honor. Tourists started coming to the bay soon after its discovery and it is
today one of the most visited places in Alaska.
We learned that the glacier is more than 4,000 feet thick in places, up to 20
miles wide and extends more than 100 miles to the St. Elias Range of Mountains
to the northeast.

Muir had found in 1879 that the ice had already retreated 10
miles since he first discovered it a decade before. By 1916, the gigantic Grand
Pacific Glacier had retreated 65 miles from the head of the bay to Tarr Inlet.
Geologists note that such rapid decline in size is not known anywhere else in
the world.

We were also told that on a worldwide basis, glaciers and
polar ice store more water than all the planet’s lakes, rivers, groundwater and
the atmosphere holds combined. Scientists say that 10 percent of the Earth is
under ice today and equals the amount being formed. If the world’s ice ever is
completely thawed – and there is much debate about the so-called “global
warming” today – the sea would flood half of the world’s cities. That seems to
be one of the reputed scientific “facts.”

The Greenland and Antarctic
ice caps are two miles thick. Alaska
is supposedly 4 percent ice. Those are difficult facts to grasp. I might ask,
“So where’s the gin?”

After seeing the mouths of the massive glaciers dump so much
ice into the ocean and reading about record snow fall the last two years in Alaska, I came to have
my doubts about the scare talk over the perils of global warming. That is
despite some of the scare coming from today’s political leaders, even former
Vice President Al Gore whom I admire.

Glaciers form, the National Park Service Rangers told us,
because snowfall in the high mountains exceeds snowmelt. The snow flakes first
change to granular snow – round ice grains – when the weight of falling snow
compresses them. The accumulated weight eventually presses the snow into solid
ice. Eventually, the force of gravity causes the ice mass to slowly flow down
slope as much as seven feet per day.

The Glacier
BayNational Park
and Reserve takes in 12 glaciers that calve into the bay, as the process it is
called when big chunks of ice shear off the face and fall into the water. The
huge icebergs may last a week or more. They provide temporary perches for bald
eagles and other birds. According to the Park Service, white bergs hold many
air bubbles. Blue bergs are dense. Greenish-blackish bergs may carry moraine
rubble scooped up from the earth. Even a modest looking berg may suddenly loom
enormous when it tips over to form a threat to close boats or anybody so
foolish as to be walking on it.

We didn’t see any whales in Glacier Bay, but a Park Service
brochure said Alaskan waters host 10 species of baleen whales (which have a
screen of sorts of toothy substance to filter out tiny shrimp from the water)
and 5 species of toothed whales. Bay waters contain baleen whales, Minke whales
which migrate and feed on cod and Pollock, orca (also known as Killer Whales
with distinctive black and white markings) and humpback whales.

The humpback whales are acrobatic and heave their massive
bodies and large flukes by leaps and turns out of the water. Only 7 percent of
their pre-whaling numbers still remain and they are now protected from whalers.
Adults are up to 50 feet long. They are coastal feeders that frequent Alaska and feed there in
winter on krill, shrimp and small fish. “To see these large whales,” said a
Park Service publication, “in their native habitat surely counts as one of the
great experiences of a lifetime.”

Tellingly, the Park Service publication says “most of the
available information about whales derives from attempts to hunt them, not to
save them from extinction.”

After spending an hour anchored near one glacier, the ship
moved to be close to another glacier where a big fountain of milky water gushed
from a large hole at the base of its face and into the ocean. It was quite a
sight. No commentary on the subject was offered and I suspected the glacial
fountain could be the subject of a promising scientific paper by an ambitious
student.

Once the ship upped anchor, Betty and I joined our new
friends, Dr. Ulrich Bauer and his wife, Susan Brown, for lunch in the Lido
Restaurant. We enjoyed a glass of wine and the beautiful sight of a nearby
glacier as the ship swung around and moved on. The ice had shades of blue and
deep striations lines of soil and rubble it had picked up as it flowed down
from the mountains and carved a gulch into the valley.

Ulrich, whose nickname is “Uly” (pronounced you-lee), told
me about coming to America
at age 6 with his family. The trip out of Nazi-controlled Germany came because of the intervention by a
family friend in The Netherlands who persuaded the government to permit the
Bauer family to immigrate to the United States. It took a while for
his father to go through the physician license hoops, but he soon did and
practiced medicine in a Boston hospital and in New YorkState. Uly’s uncle
survived World War II by hiding in a friend’s attic in Amsterdam for four years. That story is
similar to that of Anne Frank who lived long enough to write a book before she
was ultimately captured and died in a concentration camp.

Notwithstanding the stomach-turning horror of hearing the
stories from the Bauer’s about their family’s escape from Nazi clutches, we had
a great view of the glaciers and the coastline of this desolate area of Alaska. I had seafood
and Cole slaw salad, a tiny piece of beef and some smoked salmon. Susie snagged
a plate of smoked turkey and another plate of yummy desserts for our table.

Later, Betty and I walked around the ship’s Promenade Deck four
times to get in our daily mile. We arranged to meet the Bauers and Tony and
Shelly Fernandez for dinner in the Rotterdam Restaurant at 8 p.m. that evening.
I spent part of the afternoon working on my travelogue while Betty attended a
presentation on native crafts of Alaska.
Unfortunately, the dog-and-pony show was diminished because the room was dim
and unheated.

We also spent some time late in the day in the ship’s
Internet Café, where I paid $18 to check my email. I saw that my stock in
Schering-Plough (the company I retired from) had been pounded in the stock
market last Friday after FDA refused to approve a new company drug to help
patients recover from anesthesia. This was the second or third adverse position
FDA has taken recently against SGP, a cause for concern for me and other
investors.

While I was bothered by the negative news about my
investment performance, I was pleased to see positive emails from my loved ones
– son Casey, his wife Caroline and her mother, JoAnn Glass. They all wrote they
were looking forward to seeing photos Betty and I were taking of our cruise and
visit to Alaska.Betty has so far taken more than 300 photos
so I know I’ll have some work when I get home to have them properly posted with
captions on the Internet.

We joined the Bauer and the Hernandez couples for dinner in
the Rotterdam Restaurant that evening. It was a “formal” – which is taken to
mean “dress up” and not necessarily requiring a tuxedo – affair so I wore a
sport coat and necktie and Betty wore one of her sleek, black dresses with a
jeweled top she had purchased in Gulf Shores, AL. We enjoyed a festive evening
with new friends at the table.

Tony Hernandez treated the table to glasses of sparking wine
or champagne.

The attentive wait staff produced first-class menus for the
six of us. I went for the “surf and turf” dish of lobster tail and a six-ounce
cut of filet mignon; both were perfectly cooked. I also enjoyed escargot
(snails) burgundy and a Caesar salad. Betty had braised veal on the bone and
also a serving of escargot. We both passed on the Baked Alaska dessert due to
lactose intolerance. But the desserts were nicely presented by marching chefs
waving sparklers while stepping to Sousa music. Other kitchen staff joined in
the march that circled the elegant dining room.

Our conversation with the Bauer and Hernandez couples was
excellent. It produced a lot of laughs when Susie recounted the humor behind
Jewish quips about “mayonnaise and white bread” and other aspects of the
lifestyle and innocent miss-understandings concerning gentiles like me and
Betty.

As usual, our group was among the last to call it an evening
and depart the restaurant shortly after 10 p.m. I had the good fortune to sit
next to Uly during dinner and came to a greater appreciation of just how smart
and witty he is. He retired as a colonel from the U.S. Army Medical Corps in
the mid-1990s and is a fun guy to talk to about the military and experiences it
presents those who honorably serve.